Boys of the Old Sea Bed: Tales of Nature and Adventure

by Charles Allen McConnell

It was yet dark when the voice of the boss aroused him, and he followed with the men to their early breakfast of pork and beans, biscuit and syrup, and strong, black coffee.

There he soon found Rob, and the meeting compensated Ed for the hardship of the journey. Rob told him that Bally Tarbox had arrived the night before, and had taken charge of the drive, and he had looked for Ed to come over and join the polers.

While the work of the polers was more dangerous than that of the sackers, it was much more agreeable, and, too, the wages were three dollars a day, while the pay of the sackers was but a dollar and a quarter to a dollar and a half.

By the time a dim twilight told that another cloudy day had begun, Rob and Ed, with their long ash poles to balance themselves, were upon the river, riding the logs as they floated along with the rapid current. The water had been held back by the big dam until a great drive of logs had gathered, and then the gates were opened for the logs to rush through and on down the river with the falling waters. It was the work of the polers to see that none of the logs lodged in the mouths of the little creeks, and to keep them moving while they were in the river.

It was inevitable that some of the logs should remain stranded upon the banks as the water receded, and this brought in the work of the sackers. Their implements were not long poles, such as the log riders used, but stout staves about five feet in length. Upon one side of each was a steel hook, and in the end a long, sharp spike. These were called “peaveys.” Where the stranded log was small and at some distance from the water, a row of men would approach it upon either side, and, picking it up bodily with their hooks, would carry it to the river. Where the log was too large to carry, it would be rolled over and over at a rapid rate until it went splashing into the water.

It not infrequently happened that a big log would be found in such a position that the sackers would be obliged to wade out into the icy water waist deep before the great trunk would float free.

Many a time Ed and Rob had been thankful for their good fortune as polers when they would hear the boss roll out a torrent of curses upon the sackers as they hesitated upon the icy plunge on some particularly cold morning.

While the sackers might count on being wet every day, and nearly all day of every day, the polers were by no means exempt from that source of discomfort. Frequently, in making the jump from one log to another, a foot would slip, or, the distance miscalculated, a sudden bath be provided among the crashing logs.

Again, a moment of careless inattention would deliver the log rider to the tender mercies of a “sweep,” or an unsettling blow from another log. Sometimes, when the river must needs be crossed, a log would be selected as the ferrying raft which would prove too light to sustain the weight of the rider, and the sackers would howl their derision at the poler being “bucked” into the water by his “steed.”

Rob never forgot one such experience he had on Easter Sunday of that year. It was just after the gates had been lifted at Jennie Bull dam, and the crew of an hundred and fifty men were striving with all their might to hurry all the logs through before the water should go down. The day had opened bleak and dreary. A raw wind swept down the river from the north, cutting faces like a saw, and the poor sackers, wet to the waist, were in the depths of misery. Then, shortly after noon, the leaden skies began to spit snow, and a little scum of ice appeared along the edges of the stream. What an Easter Day! Rob and Ed, to whom memories of other Resurrection Sabbaths in the city came, with their lilies and joy and song, could be thankful that, so far, they were on the logs, dry, and compared with the sackers, warm.